I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but about a year ago someone asked why I study martial arts. It was someone I’d met through Facebook, someone I don’t know in real life, but who is herself involved in martial arts (Sunmudo, actually!).

I couldn’t answer. In fact, it left me incapable of continuing the conversation, and we’ve barely been in touch since.

“Why do you study martial arts?”.

Such a simple question! But whenever I tried to grasp the answer, it slipped away from me. It was there, but I couldn’t see it, only the shape of its absence. I’ve thought about it almost every day since, sensing how close it is. I couldn’t find the answer, though…

Ever since then, whenever someone’s asked, I’ve given the usual glib answers - but I’ve known that they’re not the real reason.

Why am I studying martial arts? I began to wonder, myself. This elusive question… It seemed to cause a mental paralysis. I could function perfectly well as long as I didn’t think about it. As soon as I did, though, my reasoning ability left me; there was a hole that I could never quite focus on…

A year….

Then today it hit me. It’s been my own personal koan. Aren’t there Zen monks who spend their lives contemplating one specific question, waiting for it to finally wear down their intellectual, rationalising mind, until they break through beyond into direct experience?

I’m studying martial arts because I want stillness and an empty mind. Clarity. A mind like a clear pool, where all the silt has settled.

Meditation does this. Regular sitting practice, in my own experience (never mind books, or what people say), has shown me this. After my first Vipassana retreat, I had a taste of it, and it lasted for almost nine months. It wore off. Right after that, I began my MBA, and that knocked my meditation practice into a cocked hat; I’ve never managed to get it back on track.

I’m working on fixing that. But even so… anyone can be calm when they’re on retreat. The hermit is untroubled… but in the city, how do we maintain stillness of mind? Of course, regular sitting practice develops mindfulness; meditators do get stronger, and can maintain their calm mind in daily life. What about when we’re faced with existential fear - like, for example, finding yourself broke and stranded in a foreign land? (Not that I’m in that situation, I hasten to add! It’s not impossible to imagine, though!)

The key to this breakthrough may have been in that visit to the Yiquan Academy. After the zhan zhuang, I was pushing hands with a bigger, stronger, opponent who was doing his best to push me backwards into a coatstand. The zhan zhuang, though, had left me calm, centred, able to observe and react impartially, without emotional engagement.

It only struck me later: that is what I’m looking for. That is why I’m studying martial arts, and the internal martial arts in particular.

The health benefits aren’t the reason, though they help.

The ability to defend myself isn’t the reason, though it will be great if I ever get that good.

I’m studying to try to reach that calm, to maintain that clear pool, even when someone is trying to knock me silly, or flatten me. When I’m faced with the really big fears. When there’s nowhere to go but through. Meditation in motion - just like it said on the tin. Baguazhang, taijiquan, and yiquan - they’re all getting me there. I just didn’t realise it till now.

Meditation training with extreme prejudice, perhaps.

Do you think I’m crazy yet? Or are you perhaps thinking, everyone knew this, what’s the big deal? Well… I could have repeated it to you before, because I’ve read it in books. Now, though, I’ve directly experienced it - and it went so deep it took me a while to realize what had happened.

Wow.

Now I really can’t wait to get started with the yiquan.

My class this morning with Master Sun Ru Xian went pretty well; we reviewed the 5th, 6th and 8th palms of the Ba Da Zhang, he gave a demo of the Shanxi whipstaff, and then we all had lunch. “We” here meaning Sun Lao Shi, his wife, Rene, Rene’s girlfriend, and myself. All but me speak Mandarin, so on these occasions I just nod and smile a lot, and Rene translates when he can.

A bit of trivia came up - Wan Lai Sheng, the famous Ziranmen master, and one of the “Five Tigers who went to the south”, was a graduate of China Agricultural University, where I’m teaching. Heh.

Speaking of the university, we lecturers are still waiting to hear about our contracts - if we will have our contracts renewed (probably), and which subjects we’ll be teaching if we do get a contract. Some of next semester’s courses begin in September, others in October. If I start in October, I’m very tempted to spend most of September in Korea. I have an invitation to visit the Kwan Um centre in Daejon, and I’m really tempted to spend a week or so in the Golgulsa temple, where they teach Sunmudo. This latter would be a bonus - my reason for going to stay in the temples would be to get some intensive meditation done, which I really need at the moment.

I mentioned this to Sun Lao Shi, and he wasn’t happy. He said that I must practice bagua a lot beforehand if I go - since people in Golgulsa (well, one person) know that I study martial arts, I would be a representative of the Chinese martial arts community in general, and of his students in particular. In his opinion, I’m not good enough. He’s quite right, but I hadn’t the least intention of giving demonstrations… Still, as I mentioned, he’s the most traditional of my teachers, and here’s the proof. Yikes. Well, ok: there’s a challenge to me to practice more during July and August.

Can do.

Phew, something’s going on, that’s for sure - I had vivid dreams last night that woke me up every hour or so, drenched in perspiration even though I had the aircon on low at 23C….What were those dreams? Of course I don’t remember them, but I DO remember that they seemed to me about my past lives… Not in the reincarnation sense, but the people I’ve been in this life - the country boy on a scholarship to a school where everyone else seemed more talented and cosmpolitan… the techie… the politician…. the consultant…

And now here I am lecturing in Beijing. Time to count my blessings, I guess, and to take stock of the path that’s led me here. I’ve been stressing out about this for a while, particularly since the trip to Pingyao. Two of my companions on that trip were fellow-students on my MBA; one now works for one of the biggest-name investment banks, the other for a major global advertising firm. I, on the other hand, went to work for a startup that was going to make me rich… if it hadn’t tanked instead. Unexpected market changes, no blame anywhere; it couldn’t be helped. So I’ve been lecturing… It’s certainly no way to recoup what I spent on the MBA, although it does offer opportunities. Looking at it conventionally, there’s no doubt that my star has fallen far, and sometimes that worries me.

And yet…. here I am in Beijing. I enjoy my job. It gives me daily opportunity to cultivate a compassionate outlook, to develop humility, and to seek to improve myself. It’s interesting. I’ve got the chance to train bagua with one of the big names in the field, Sun Zhijun, and to be honest I think I’ll be one of the last to have that opportunity. I’m developing what seems to be a more traditional relationship with my other bagua teacher, who’s also going to teach me Shanxi short staff and other styles… I’ve got a good Ch’an meditation teacher who speaks English, can put Ch’an into the context of traditional Chinese medicine and Daoist thought, and is well-connected with the monastic community here in China…I’ll soon have the opportunity to start training in Yiquan’s highly regarded methods… I may not be earning much money even in Beijing terms… but it’s enough to live simply and comfortably, while paying for my training…. I’m meeting interesting people…

I have feeling that if I can stay here for a couple of years, that’s all I need to make the breakthrough, to make significant progress on the questions of “Why am I here?”, “What is my true purpose in life?” and on starting to clear my karma… cultivating water-nature and wu-wei… After that - which coincidentally will be around the time I turn 40 - it will be time to start a new chapter, and right now only one option is looking like it will make sense… but a lot could happen before then.

So yeah, it’s a long way from when I was a cutting-edge geek and rising political player with a comfortable amount of cash in the bank - but I’m happier and more content than I’ve ever been. Lao Zi would approve, no doubt!

I didn’t write up everything that happened last week when I went to the Yiquan Academy, because there were a few things that happened that called for a little more reflection before I talked about them.

You can’t knock around the world of internal martial arts for as long as I have without learning, even by osmosis, that the masters consider the root and power of their arts to lie in zhan zhuang, or standing practice, rather than in the form. However… I haven’t particularly practiced zhan zhuang, and few of my teachers have put much emphasis on it. My taijiquan practice is what’s given me a feel for it, I guess, and particularly the taijigong taught by Nam Wah Pai in Singapore.

Yiquan, of course, is all about the zhan zhuang, with no set form at all. When I went to the Academy last week, H. told me we would just practice what I know as the basic “holding the tree” posture, with some mind work to accompany it. I’ve tried this posture a few times over the years, and have a few books that talk about it, but in all my solo work I’ve very rarely practised it - time always seemed so short, and I needed to work on the forms I was learning before I forgot them again!

So I stood in this position for about half an hour. After a few minutes, of course, muscles started to ache. My shoulders are chronically stiff, so they hurt. The long muscle or whatever that runs down the right side of the spine was also really tight as well; that’s the result of all the desk-work lately. What to do? H had shown me a “relaxation posture”, where the hands are moved to the back, next to the kidneys, to use if I got too tired, but it seemed better to me to try to get through the pain while keeping the same posture.

I decided to do what I learned on Vipassana meditation retreats; when experiencing physical pain, don’t seek relief by moving the body - instead, send the mind to the pain, and try to find the exact spot where the pain is located. The result is that the pain just goes away. It worked. That let me carry on doing the other extra practices that H. had mentioned. Glenn had also reminded me to form my back into a bow shape in order to tuck the coccyx underneath, so I remembered to work on that and on sinking my weight. After twenty minutes or so, I as tired, and a funny thing happened - it really felt that my arms were being held up not by strength and muscle, but by intent and will.

It as at this point that we tried out the sparring. I’m usually very bad at this; I think too slowly, and easily get my balance messed up. My partner/opponent was quite a bit bigger than me, stronger than me, and about fifteen years younger than me. However, the effect of the standing practice seemed to be that when he issued force, it just seemed to pass through me; I didn’t need to have to consciously react to it, and it didn’t affect me. My awareness was still intense in my arms, and I could sense changes in his strength and respond naturally, without thought. At one point, he got through my guard and pushed me forcefully on the right pectoral, which would normally have sent me flying backwards. On this occasion, I could just sense exactly where the power was, and was able to pivot around it and step behind him; he went flying forwards instead, as his strength didn’t find anywhere to land.

This is very uncommon for me! In fact, it was just total beginner’s luck.

Still. This is the first time I’ve ever managed experienced what taiji, for example, is meant to be all about - to use softness to defeat an opponent who was actively seeking to throw me hard into a wall. To experience why the internal martial arts are powerful beyond qinna and other physical techniques. Heh. I know that some of the people who read this blog are very good internal martial artists and will be saying “At last! It took you long enough!”. I know. I’m a slow learner, but I’m just trying to learn at my own pace - bear with me!

A related event occurred the following Saturday, when I went for my bagua pan guan bi class with Sun Zhi Jun and Mi Lao Shi. I’ve revised the form, and can go through it without many mistakes now. They were telling me, though, that it looked ugly. How could I change that, without being able to see myself? I just did it again with more focus; putting more intent into the movements as if I was surrounded by opponents. Much better, was the response. Hmmm. So “intent” was what improved it…

As usual, none of this leads up to any particular point. However, it is an important breakthrough for me to discover that combining standing practice with a meditation technique did clearly, and immediately, show results against an aggressive training partner. Heh, apologies again to those of you who’ve been patiently waiting for me to “get it”!

A bad patch only in terms of my martial arts practice, I hasten to add; things generally are OK.

We all have to find the balance somewhere between job, career, etc on the one hand, and martial arts, meditation, etc on the other. In Singapore, the balance for me was firmly on the right hand side of the equation. Since my move to Beijing, it’s swung well over to the other side.

Hopefully, a bit more of a balanced situation is in site, as the future becomes a bit clearer. It was my intention to return to Singapore after my contract ends in July, but I’ve changed my mind. Much as I like Singapore, it makes absolutely no sense career-wise to go back there; there’s just no opportunity there, whereas in Beijing there’s much, much more happening. I’m also pretty happy with the teachers I have here as well, both in martial arts and in Zen meditation.

In my job, this semester has been crazy; I didn’t have any opportunity to prepare before I arrived, and went straight into teaching, so I’ve constantly been playing catch-up. The university want me to stay on, and I like the job, so I think I’ll be here for at least another year…. I’ll be on summer break between mid-July and early September, so I’ll have time to take the Yiquan course, AND to do all my preparation for the next semester… so I’ll have more time for daily practice once I start teaching again.

Speaking of Yiquan, Hannah’s invited me to her class on Thursday, so I’ll meet her teacher.

Oh, you may remember that a few weeks ago I met a young martial arts teacher who’s based at Beijing Language and Culture University; he’s just emailed me to let know that he’s put some videos online. Here’s one; there’s more on YouTube:

« Older Posts — Newer Posts »